A security indicator is a sign that shows us what something is like or how a situation is changing and can aid us in making informed estimations on cyber risks. There are many different breeds of security indicators, but, unfortunately, they are not always easy to apply due to a lack of available or credible sources of data. This paper undertakes a systematic mapping study on the academic literature related to cyber security indicator data. We identified 117 primary studies from the past five years as relevant to answer our research questions. They were classified according to a set of categories related to research type, domain, data openness, usage, source, type and content. Our results show a linear growth of publications per year, where most indicators are based on free or internal technical data that are domain independent. While these indicators can give valuable information about the contemporary cyber risk, the increasing usage of unconventional data sources and threat intelligence feeds of more strategic and tactical nature represent a more forward-looking trend. In addition, there is a need to take methods and techniques developed by the research community from the conceptual plane and make them practical enough for real-world application.

The aim of this work is to design a formal framework for consent management in line with EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). To make a general solution, we consider a high-level modeling language for distributed service-oriented systems, building on the paradigm of active objects. Our framework provides a general solution for data subjects to observe and change their privacy settings and to be informed about all personal data stored about them. The solution consists of a set of predefined types for privacy related concepts, a formalization of policy compliance, a set of interfaces that forms the basis of interaction with external users for consent management, a set of classes that is used in interaction with the runtime system, and a runtime system enforcing the consented policies.

The privacy by design principle has been applied in system engineering. In this paper, we follow this principle, by integrating necessary safeguards into the program system design. These safeguards are then used in the processing of personal information. In particular, we use a formal language-based approach with static analysis to enforce privacy requirements. To make a general solution, we consider a high-level modeling language for distributed service-oriented systems, building on the paradigm of active objects. The language is then extended to support specification of policies on program constructs and policy enforcement. For this we develop i) language constructs to formally specify privacy restrictions, thereby obtaining a policy definition language, ii) a formal notion of policy compliance, and iii) a type and effect system for enforcing and analyzing a program's compliance with the stated polices.

In modern systems it is often necessary to distinguish between confidential (low-level) and non-confidential (high-level) information. Confidential information should be protected and not communicated or shared with low-level users. The non-interference policy is an information flow policy stipulating that low-level viewers should not be able to observe a difference between any two executions with the same low-level inputs. Only high-level viewers may observe confidential output. This is a non-trivial challenge when considering modern distributed systems involving concurrency and communication. The present paper addresses this challenge, by choosing language mechanisms that are both useful for programming of distributed systems and allow modular system analysis. We consider a general concurrency model for distributed systems, based on concurrent objects communicating by asynchronous methods. This model is suitable for modeling of modern service-oriented systems, and gives rise to efficient interaction avoiding active waiting and low-level synchronization primitives such as explicit signaling and lock operations. This concurrency model has a simple semantics and allows us to focus on information flow at a high level of abstraction, and allows realistic analysis by avoiding unnecessary restrictions on information flow between confidential and non-confidential data. Due to the non-deterministic nature of concurrent and distributed systems, we define a notion of interaction non-interference policy tailored to this setting. We provide two kinds of static analysis: a secrecy-type system and a trace analysis system, to capture inter-object and network level communication, respectively. We prove that interaction non-interference is satisfied by the combination of these analysis techniques. Thus any deviation from the policy caused by implicit information leakage visible through observation of network communication patterns, can be detected. The contribution of the paper lies in the definition of the notion of interaction non-interference, and in the formalization of a secrecy type system and a static trace analysis that together ensure interaction non-interference. We also provide several versions of a main example (a news subscription service) to demonstrate network leakage.

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